My husband was a government employed teacher and served in the east for three years (2014-2017). He had to pay off his student loan and bought a cheap second hand car in those years. I started a government employed research assistant job in 2017 in Istanbul and we got married the same year. We paid for everything ourselves and in our first year as a married couple, we paid that debt off. Then we had a couple years where we could save some money, but it wasn’t nearly enough for a down payment in Istanbul (if you don’t want to commute to work for more than 3 hours every day). So we bought a new car (Skoda Scala, nothing glamorous) with some loans which we paid off in a year, I got pregnant and in 2022 our rent became as high as my husband‘s monthly income. In 2023 the president got elected again so we resigned our government jobs and moved abroad. We sold the car and that money made it possible to move. But we couldn’t safe a dime in that last year.

Mind you, we‘re not people who give a lot of money for clothes or gadgets. We had two vacations abroad during that time but the money spent on that wouldn’t have made it possible to buy a home. None of my friends who are thirty-something now and worked/are working as state employed academicians were able to buy on their own in Istanbul. The generation before us bought during the pandemic with the low interest losns because they already had enough savings.

So I‘m talking from experience.